


To Take Away What I Know is Mine

by dynamicsymmetry



Category: Uncharted
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 04:32:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2799695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nate, Elena, the sky, the road, a ring, an end, a beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Take Away What I Know is Mine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Rhiannon87](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhiannon87/gifts).



He spends a lot of time looking at his ring.

He doesn't let her see. It might not be a big deal, but he can't escape the feeling that she might regard it as obsessive behavior, that she might read too much into it, and not that she might get angry or criticize him for it but that she might do what was always so much worse, which is worry. Get quiet and worry. About him, about them. About what's coming next.

He's not letting that happen. Not again.

But he looks at it. He looks at it when she's asleep beside him, when her breathing is lulling him, her bare arm against his bare chest, and he turns his hand in the moonlight. In the starlight. In the firelight. In the light of sunset, of dawn, of lazy warm afternoons. In the lights of countless cities, because they never stop moving, because they never could. It was one of the things that brought them together, made them fit. Kept throwing them in each other's path, made it feel fated. Even when fate turned and bit them.

He wants to believe the course of the universe is self-correcting. He knows the old line about the course of true love; it would be nice if that one ended up being less than consistent.

The color of the ring tends to change, dependent on the quality of the light. He thinks it's never the same twice. It's not unsettling, nor does it make him think it might be some kind of omen about the thing as a whole.

He might be superstitious about some things. A few things. Life has taught him to be so. But not about this.

Tonight it's city light, neon light, shifting and changing and flowing from form to form, like strange bioluminescent flowers in some deep and forgotten cave. Outside, far below them in the streets, life goes on much as it does in the daytime, but up this high everything is almost still. He sits up, quietly slides out of bed, moves to the window and pulls the blinds fully aside and looks out.

He can't see stars, not now, but next week they'll be hitting the road again, heading into the countryside. Things will be different there, because things are always different everywhere.

Except her. The thing about her is that she never really changes. She does, but... not the core. He's never felt solid, never really felt like he was fully _there,_ but with her it's not so. She was rock when he was sand, though there's something cliché about the idea and he knows it, but it also fits, and for a variety of reasons it's very appropriate.

He closes his eyes, feels the warm metal pressed against his middle and little finger, against his palm when he closes his fist.

Even when he isn't looking at it, he's thinking about it. Sooner or later his focus always returns there.

But it's just a stand-in for something else, really. It's a thing on which to meditate that will never be the thing in itself, the deeper part, the truth behind the truth. So he goes back to bed, goes back to her, pulls her into his arms and smiles into her hair when she murmurs against his throat. And he thinks he would give up everything for this, if she asked him to, but she won't - not everything - because there are parts of him that she understands, accepts, loves, that no one else ever could or ever will.

In a world where he never had a home, she makes herself into that for him.

~

So they leave the city. She drives - she always drives - and he sits and leans his head back, extends his hand out the window, lets the wind take it and lift and drop it like the tail of a fish. It's a deep, wet spring and while there's no sun the hills through which they're climbing are an almost shockingly deep green. It's a color with density. It weighs on the eyes, and the weight is not unpleasant.

She asks him, _Where do you want to go?_ And it's a joke, an old one, and he laughs and kisses her and doesn't move when she laughs and pushes at him and protests that she has to keep her eyes on the road.

They're charmed, is what he believes. With her, nothing touches him. More fortune than he could ever take from the stolen ring of a stolen ancestor.

He has no past. He threw that into the sand and walked away. He might not have realized he was doing it at the time, but he's never looked back.

They have nothing but themselves and the car when the night comes on, but when he suggests they stop she does, and they pull off the road and move a little way into the trees, make a fire in a circle of stones, and trust that if the land is owned the owner will be amiable and not shoot them or attack them with animals.

Again, he thinks _charmed._

They have almonds and candied fruit taken from the city, and chocolate and little dried pastries that aren't quite cookies and taste of cinnamon and cloves, and they eat those under the stars, washing them down with a bottle of rather good scotch he lifted from somewhere, because some habits die hard and you don't just stop stealing after a lifetime of doing it. But she doesn't care, she's become more than happy to choose her battles, and when she pushes up onto her knees and frames his face with her hands and kisses him, she tastes of sugar and spice.

He's still kissing her, tasting her, and she's laughing into his mouth when he pushes her down onto the blanket they've spread out, and what they do then is slow and easy and deep, and takes no thought or concentration.

Because the truth is that she makes everything easy. It was only ever him that made it difficult.

And later there are no lights but the stars, not even cars on the road, and they might be the only people for miles. And they might be in a desert, in a trackless jungle, in a vast stretch of tundra, or on a boat far from any shore, and it wouldn't matter. There's no more treasure to hunt. He's found it.

_I love you,_ he whispers against her cheek, and she sighs and murmurs something, and it doesn't matter if she was awake enough to hear him. He didn't need to say it at all.

He looks at the stars for a long time, and then he closes his eyes, turns the ring on his finger with the tip of his thumb. It's his meditation, his litany, a beginning and an end, around and around the world forever.

It's the only name he needs now.

**Author's Note:**

> I've been writing a lot of sad things lately. Thank you so much for the chance to write something that isn't sad at all. 
> 
> Happy Yuletide. <3
> 
> (title is from ["Feeling the Pull" by The Swell Season](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aTL8nWNn3w))


End file.
